Mobile device technology has provided many important tools for productivity in modern society. Unfortunately, this technology can create major distractions and create dangerous situations when used in certain environments, such as when a driver uses a device while driving a vehicle. While these dangers would seem to be apparent, drivers continue to interact with mobile devices while driving, putting themselves and those around them in serious danger. For example, a teenage driver may respond to a received text message while driving, thereby taking his attention off the roadway, resulting in injury or death to himself and/or innocent bystanders.
Current technologies that address this problem rely primarily on software applications to restrict functionality of the mobile device while a vehicle is in motion. Some software applications rely on the user to manually indicate when they have entered or exited the vehicle, i.e., the software application relies on an “honor system” that may or may not be accurate. In other examples, these software applications detect the motion of the car and disable the mobile device, either partially or fully. In these examples, the software applications may utilize GPS and accelerometer functionality of modern mobile devices. In such cases, these solutions cannot distinguish between the driver and passengers.
Some solutions use a combination of software and hardware devices in conjunction with the mobile device. These solutions typically utilize the vehicle's on-board diagnostic (“OBD”) ports to detect the status of the vehicle and communicate various attributes of the vehicle to the software application executing on the mobile device, e.g., an “in-motion” status. Depending upon the communicated status of the vehicle, the software application may alter the functionality of the mobile device. For example, if the vehicle is moving, the software application may enable an “airplane” mode of the mobile device to prevent any wireless communication, such as sending or receiving text messages.
Other solutions utilize a non-OBD hardware device to define a “driver's side” zone and disable the mobile device when it is in the “driver's side” zone. These solutions suffer from significant problems, one of which being the solution's inability to identify between the driver's device and a passenger's device who is sitting behind the driver. As such, these solutions often end up disabling all the mobile devices that are on the “driver's side” including the backseat passenger on the driver's side. These solutions also suffer from an inability to extend the zones to cover other areas of the vehicle fully or partially, such as the passenger seats. For example, a hardware device may be placed on the windshield, where an application on mobile device might detect whether the mobile device is on right side or left side of the hardware device and disable the device when in the left side of the vehicle, i.e., the driver's side. However, in smaller cars, a driver may extend their hand to passenger side of the seat, crossing the invisible line created by device which is placed on windshield, and use the mobile device. Due to the shortcomings of the current solutions, these solutions meet with limited adoption, as they tend to disable unintended mobile devices beyond the driver's devices.
One of the prerequisite conditions for such systems is that they must remain in a known/installed position and moving the system from its “installed” position defeats the purpose of these systems, i.e., if a hardware device is installed on a dashboard and the system is configured based on that installed position, moving the hardware device to the trunk or outside of the vehicle defeats the purpose of the system. For example, when a hardware device is used to identify the position of the cell phone (driver/passenger seat), the teenage/novice driver may tend to move the hardware device to fool the system, thereby defeating the purpose of the system. Current systems generally suffer from an inability to detect the relocation of sensors.
Brown, U.S. Pat. No. 6,690,940 discloses a system for restricting a mobile device based on the device's presence in a predefined area. The area may be indicated by a pressure switch in vehicle seats or may comprise a 3-D volume of space. The system may use GPS coordinates of the device to determine if the device is within a certain distance of a certain object, or the system may transmits a signal and if the device receives it, the device is disabled. In other word, the “predetermined area” is merely the range of the signal, i.e., signal strength is not used to define areas or determine the relative location of the device.
Guba, U.S. Patent Pub. No. 2011/0009107, discloses a system of disabling a mobile device based on the speed of the vehicles the device is in. The device (“receiver”) receives a signal indicating the speed of the vehicle from a transmitter in the vehicle and the receiver enables/disables accordingly. The invention merely describes using Bluetooth as the transmission protocol, but does not use the signal strength for any particular purpose. This invention does not rely on predefined zones, but treats any receiver than receives the signal as being controllable based on the speed of the vehicle. In other words, this invention cannot determine a spatial position of a given device only that it is “in range”. Other systems, such as U.S. Pat. No. 8,761,821, restrict device functionality by determining the position of the CMD within a “restricted zone” based on triangulating its position based on signals transmitted BY the device, e.g., the strength of its cell signal received at cell towers. In other words, the device position is based on its transmitted signals, rather than signals received by device. As such, this system cannot detect changed sensor placement.